The Sun Tried Speed Dating Other Stars?! 💘

Original 2D space animation by Orbitimbre. Cosmic challenges, planet stories, and surprising endings. Join the Orbitimbre crew for custom emoji and loyalty badges: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtPoouzahVkQOs2gA206XRw/join The Sun has been single for 4.6 billion years. Tonight, he has a date. The planets panic: a second star close by could stretch, scramble, or even throw their orbits away. So they launch Operation Bad Date and crash a cosmic speed-dating show: a Brown Dwarf, a Pulsar who already has three planets, a Black Hole and a White Dwarf. Every dealbreaker is a real fact about stars. Then the "perfect" Blue Supergiant walks in... and her gravity starts pulling the whole family away. Stay to the end: a real star is heading our way. Chapters: 0:00 The Sun has a date 1:05 Single for 4.6 billion years 2:09 Operation Bad Date 2:56 Speed dating the galaxy 5:13 The one 6:28 Too close 7:07 The dance 8:09 Someone's coming Science notes: - The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old; sunspots come and go in a cycle of about 11 years. - Nearly half of Sun-like stars have at least one companion star. Alpha Centauri A and B circle each other about every 80 years; Proxima takes roughly half a million years for one lap. - Brown dwarfs have about 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, too little to fuse hydrogen like the Sun. - The first planets ever confirmed outside our Solar System (1992) orbit a pulsar, PSR B1257+12, which spins about 161 times a second. - Close to a black hole, the near side is pulled harder than the far side: spaghettification. - In about 5 billion years the Sun should swell into a red giant, then shrink into a white dwarf about the size of Earth. - Blue supergiants shine tens of thousands of times brighter than the Sun and live only millions of years before many of them explode as supernovae. If one shone from where the Sun is, Earth's oceans would boil away. - The "what if" scenes are thought experiments: no star like that is coming. A heavy second